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a famous case in point. Winters snorted at what he took to
be
the
meaninglessness of "peeled"; yet he saw well enough what Tate was
attempting in this early poem ("Death of Little Boys") which tried,
with the immense ambition of the '20s, to compress all life and all
tragedy into one short lyric.
It
was decidedly pitiful that the aster
should have been peeled; only pedants asked why. I am not being
facetious. This recklessness was of the essence. Just lately, reviewing
his collected poems, Tate praised Winters for having the same sort of
explosiveness, though (one expects Tate would agree) more subtly and
understandably than "peeled."
To see the change in its strongest light, one has only to compare
Harry Duncan's temperate translations of Dante, or Vernon Watkins'
translation of Heine's
The North Sea,
with Pound's recent version of
The Trachinians.
The Pound is one long sputtering explosion, set off,
to be sure, by some of his finest lyrics. The exquisitely bare 'poetry' of
Eliot's late comedies might even be called an explosion in reverse, an
apocalyptic energy of exclusion for which the younger poets have neither
the power nor the inclination. Nevertheless, it is to Yeats, Pound, Eliot,
Stevens and the other modern 'exotics' that the younger poets look.
Critics ' like Hillyer, short-sighted literalists of the tradition, turned their
own laziness into a principle of form, failing to see that Pound and Eliot
had directed the famous American scientific conscience for the first
time on the whole past of Western poetry, making a radical generosity
out of what looked superficially like snobbery. It was the only possible
advance beyond ballad-sentimentality and little-song-sentimentality and
the only escape from the hyper-gentility of the school of Bridges. The
point is worth making again if only because Hillyer's
First Principles
of Verse
is a useful beginner's handbook and because his closing portrait
of the expatriate bogeyman is such a ludicrous mistake.
The best of Leonie Adams and Richard Eberhart is of the spirit
of the '20s
pur
sang.
Eberhart, whose best quality is a sort of reck–
less, hale exuberance, seems to have increased his range by submitting
to more influences, chiefly Stevens. Uonie Adams, on the whole, has
retreated into a quieter, more private, meditative and somewhat inco–
herent manner strongly influenced (one guesses) by Emily Dickinson.
Both poets have a distinction of mind which carries them through some
passages of indistinct visualization, dubious grammar and hazy metrical
practice. They are perhaps more impressive in the round than in part;
few poems have
their
whole quality, but few are without some admir–
able lines. They show how much good poetry can be written without
